Posts Tagged ‘Priorities’

Years ago I remember Dad telling me how every task in the eyes of one of his bosses was “priority one,” which eventually prompted my dad to ask said boss to please clarify what was “priority one alpha,” “priority one beta,” “priority one gamma,” and so on.

L’s Mother and I do our best to keep this idea in mind in our daily routines, but lately her job has necessitated priorities above “priority one alpha” which she has dubbed “OMG alpha,” “OMG beta,” and “OMG gamma.”

Today, it being one of “those days,” I decided I’d best jot down a quick list of priorities for the day to help keep me on track. Having done that, I labeled the text file “Priorities” and started to move on, then I realized it being one of “those days,” I’d best be more specific least the file get lost in the shuffle, so I tried to change the title to “Today’s (4/28) Priorities.”

Fun fact: My computer doesn’t like it and ignores me when I try to include a “/” character in my text file titles, so the actual title came out to “Today’s (428) Priorities.”

This at first struck me as depressing, but then I realized the title would take on an entirely different meaning if today had only been the 20th of this month . . .

Some years ago my dad told me the story about a friend of his who asked his friend to go get a piece of wood from the woodpile so they could prop up a trailer they were working on. Despite the relative simplicity of this request, my dad’s friend waited and waited for his friend to come back with the piece of wood. Knowing that his friend was . . . prone to distraction, to put it kindly, my dad’s friend waited a long time, but eventually he went off to the woodpile himself to find out what the delay was. He found his friend at the woodpile where he was busily planning an elaborate construction project.

“What are you doing?” my dad’s friend asked him.

“I just realized I’ve got a lot of really nice wood in my woodpile this year, and it would be a shame if it got wet, so I’m building a woodshed,” he friend answered as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

Mom’s out of the hospital, so that much is right with the world. There will, of course, be more tests and doctor visits in the future to better determine what happened and, more importantly, what needs to be done from here, but all is as well as can be for now.

So that’s good.

For the first time since this all began, I talked with Mom on the phone yesterday(*), but after dispensing with the obligatory (but welcome!) status updates on her condition, she immediately changed the subject.

“But enough about me,” she said. “How are you doing? Are you over that flu yet? I noticed you were coughing when you answered the phone . . .”

Really, Mom?

Really?

*****

(*) Mom likes to travel, and all this happened far enough away that she assured me that the best thing to do unless something changed was for me to stay put, so she kept me informed via texts. She had my brother with her since this happened near him, so this made a certain amount of sense.